A Mayor’s Kind of Madness

Lin Kai glanced at the digital clock beside his bed. 4:32 a.m.

He sat on the edge of the narrow mattress, back hunched, legs apart, elbows resting loosely on his thighs. The lamp he'd unscrewed from the corridor and rewired into the room's only socket glowed faintly and unevenly. Beneath it, his tablet rested atop a folded jacket that barely cushioned the cold of the metal desk. The SYLPH A3 blueprint bloomed and stalled, blue filaments flickering on the screen as the partial upload wheezed to a halt at nineteen per cent. Stacked beside it were budget ledgers marked in his own scrawl, a printout of red-zoned districts, and a draft file titled Pretext for Energy Sovereignty.

The heating in the government dormitory was scarcely provided proper shelter, but the desk in this cramped room was tangible, as was the power cord coiled beneath his foot. His ribs ached in protest with every forward motion, yet his fingers moved with precise determination. Sleep could be postponed. Whatever lay ahead, this moment would not come again.

His ribs pricked each time he leaned forward, yet his hands moved with the steadiness of slow surgery. Sleep could wait; opportunity refused to. He flexed his left knuckles until they clicked and reminded himself this was not theft. The system had pressed the key into his palm; turning it was a civic duty, not a crime.

He opened a new folder and let the keyboard breathe a name. City Energy Institute. The words looked polite, serviceable, and instantly wrong. City had become the stamp on every failed budget memo, the prefix on each report buried in committee. He backspaced, the letters vanishing like carp scales in a gutter.

Another name surfaced. Garden Energy Institute. Softer, gentler, but Garden was also the badge on his office door. Auditors would smell self-dealing before the ink dried. Again, the screen emptied.

A throb crawled beneath his bandage. He rolled his shoulder, waited for the stabbing heat to ebb, then lifted his gaze to the stalled turbine lines. SylphCore, the codename that echoed each time the blueprint unfolded, drifted through his thoughts. He began to type, slowly at first, as if sounding syllables in a foreign prayer. SylphCore Energy Institute, provisional.

He rubbed the dryness from his eyes and breathed in the name. The letters sat upright, discreet and decidedly new. He added that the institute would belong to a mixed public and private trust, would reside under the mayoral emergency charter, and would operate through a laboratory discreetly labelled the Garden Microgrid Unit. Patent filings would move through an anonymous proxy, the inventor left unnamed, a mask clean enough to pass any honorary board.

The cursor blinked in approval. He settled back, one palm pressed to his ribs to tame the ache.

The disaster-reserve ledger loomed, a column of red digits no one dared to touch. Four million still waited there. Duan had once spent as much on fireworks, igniting colour over Dawn River while rust gnawed at the bridge supports. A faint bitterness slid down Kai's throat. Four million now might lift only a single prototype, but a prototype could become a lighthouse. He authorised the withdrawal, sealing it beneath the phrase pilot resilience initiative.

The map reappeared, red polygons pulsing like infected tissue. Dawn Garden, Zhang Development's abandoned prestige block, beat the darkest shade. A confidential memo slipped open without being asked. Sea-sand concrete, swollen rebar, settlement over twelve centimetres, voids under every slab. Someone with the initials C Y had scrawled that the night crews heard concrete ripping like cloth.

Heat rode his spine. He remembered the day of the ribbon-cutting, Duan's grin, Jialin's champagne smile, and his own applause curling through naive fingers. He felt the shame first, then the anger. He typed while the emotions overlapped. No turbine, no pilot load, no future weight would ever touch Dawn Garden until the earth beneath it could bear a human promise.

Clause Seven took shape in deft, colourless sentences, banning installation inside the precinct until full geotechnical remediation. For emphasis, he added that any attempt to override the clause required unanimous council consent recorded in open session. The lock closed with a click of his index finger.

Cold crept through the damp fabric at his shoulders. He nudged the air-conditioner; the unit rattled, exhaled lukewarm breath, and did nothing to chase the chill sliding along his bones. Still, he wrote.

He drafted the order establishing the pilot programme, couching every ambition in the language of emergency repair. No mention of turbines, only resilience, only redundancy, only the moral duty of a city to keep its children warm. He inserted a final paragraph: should the administration change, licensing rights revert to the founder, subject to nondisclosure. If they pried the office keys from his hand, the patent would follow him like loyal hounds.

Two hours slipped away in the glow of the lamp. When he pushed the tablet aside, the blueprint remained frozen at nineteen per cent, a promise half in light, half in silence. He massaged the bridge of his nose, blinked grit from his eyes, and told himself once more that this was foresight, not corruption. Garden City was collapsing; he meant to give it a spine. If that spine carried his signature, so be it. No one else had bled for it.

A notification chimed. Wind speeds rising, gale expected before dawn.

He listened; beyond the mist-fogged panes, the vents over the roof trembled, catching a restless breath.

Wind, he whispered, show me what you can do.